About two weeks ago I started baking our own bread. Mostly because all of our groceries are delivered by Amazon, but they do not carry any breads from Grand Central bakery (they do sell bread from Macrina, but we don’t like it). First off, I am NOT a baker. Really, I am not. I never make dough and even when I make pizza or pies, I always buy dough from Trader Joe’s. So baking bread from scratch was really venturing into an entirely new territory for me. I finally decided to do it after reading this recipe in NYT. It looked easy enough, so I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be very easy, delicious and very successful, even for a beginning baker with zero experience like me. And there’s almost no clean up. This weekend we decided to document the process, so that you’d see that that home-made bread we’ve been telling you about is for real…
Step one, the tools:
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Step two: measure all dry ingredients into the bowl (3 cups flower, 2 tsp salt, 0.25 tsp yeast)
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Step three: add 1.5 cups of water and mix everything into ‘shaggy’ dough and cover with plastic wrap
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Step four: ok, i’m not sure if this qualifies as a “step”, if all one has to do is to wait 12 or so hours… after 12 hours the dough looks like this:
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Step five: fold the dough with a spatula 2-3 times, shape it into a ball and put it out on a mat (you can put it on a piece of parchment paper instead, this will make moving it around much easier later on). Oil the dough.
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Step six: dust the dough with flower, cover and let rise for another 4+ hours:
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Step seven: heat the oven to 450 degrees, with a heavy dutch oven inside. After about 30+ minutes, when the oven is hot, slide the dough into the dutch oven and cover. Bake for 30 minutes.
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Step eight: Remove the lid from dutch oven and bake for another 10 minutes or until golden brown.
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Step nine: Cool on rack. The loaf is not as big as the Como, but it does last us 3 days.
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Here’s the final product, served with eggs and bacon:
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And a close-up on the texture:
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NOTE: this weekend Amazon was out of King Arthur Flour, so I ordered Stone Bur (sp?) brand instead. The bread tastes ok, but NOT as good as the bread made with KA flour. So when Amazon has it back in stock, I plan to buy a few extra packages.
